"A number of fronts", eh? Isn't zero a number?“We don’t even have all of the 30,000 additional troops in Iraq yet, so we’re supporting the president. We want this plan to have a chance of succeeding,” he said.
“Over the course of the next three to four months, we’ll have some idea how well the plan’s working. Early signs are indicating there is clearly some success on a number of fronts,” he said.
So why aren't all of the additional troops in Iraq yet? It's been about four months now that Bush has been promising big things from this "surge". If this plan is so wonderful and foolproof, why the wait?
The answer is that the entire surge strategy is really nothing more than a political stall for domestic consumption, and that we don't actually have all of those troops to spare in the first place. Bush is calling on imaginary legions, and the neocons love it!
So now the new date is June 1 to "start the clock", which was originally supposed to be six weeks. That would be July 13. And this is giving Bush the five months prior to this that he was claiming the surge was in effect and producing success "on a number of fronts", but which is now "no fair" to include as "on the clock". Okay. But watch for Republicans to say they had their fingers crossed when they said "six weeks".
By the time the clock is actually started, we'll see Republicans and their ventriloquist dummies in the military say that six months of "surge" is what any sane and patriotic person knows they really meant. This pushes us into December.
Either that, or Bush's definition of "victory" will have been changed to mean "the ability of Iraq's Parliament to convene in the Green Zone". Watch Republicans say that "nobody can deny this is a great step forward", even though they've been doing that for years.
I'm not quite sure if it's sad or scary to realise that the majority of the Republicans' supporters believe that they will all be swept away in the Rapture before Bush leaves office anyway.
In any case, it looks like Boehner thinks the surge will last at least until early September, which is the date that Petraeus has been tossing around. This makes the surge an eight month operation, at best. That's sounding more like an escalation than a "surge". The "surge" was billed as a relatively short operation that would give the Iraqi government time to stabilise and deal with the civil war. Now it's become some kind of major escalation to wipe out Al-Qaeda once and for all, except that Bush is now saying that a certain level of Al-Qaeda violence is acceptable in his new definition of "victory". Okay, so now were stretching our military to its utter limits in an effort to reduce Al-Qaeda's impact in Iraq. If Bush tried sellling that plan back in January, I doubt that even Boehner would've bit.
We still have no hard date from any Republican or military spokesman telling us when we can definitely say the "surge" has failed. This is not a timetable that "our enemies" would have to wait out, since Bush clearly is going to keep the surge going until he leaves office. It's just a benchmark by which we say if Bush's plan failed or succeeded. The fact that the man can't even give us a straight answer on that score speaks volumes.
Faith and optimism do not negate reality. If I really, really believe that I can drive 100 miles on an empty gas tank, when my car is sitting on the roadside, my faith will not fill that tank back up. We've tried crossing our fingers. We've tried rabbit's feet. We've tried clicking our heels together. Now we're just simply waiting for a miracle and calling that leadership.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that in the same Fox news interview John Boehner said in no uncertain terms that there is no civil war in Iraq. It's just us fighting terrorists. So those sectarian forces that Bush and Petraeus have been bragging about defeating with the surge are really non-existent? These guys better get their lies straight.
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